At Meols Cop High School we want to develop stronger homework habits across all subject areas. We had some great initial ideas of how to do this and our Assistant Headteacher Greg Thornton (@MrThorntonTeach) was leading an inquiry group last year which has lead to some significant developments in our homework policy for the upcoming 2023/24 academic year. As part of the inquiry group, in order to help our exploration of effective homework, I offered to run a trial with our year 7 cohort during the summer term focused on online maths homework.

We had invested in the fabulous Sparx Maths at the beginning of the year but through a number of factors (including some poor implementation!) we really weren’t getting the hand in and student engagement that we wanted.

I knew Peps Mccrea’s outstanding book “Motivated Teaching” would have some fantastic insights, ideas and answers for improving student motivation towards homework.
Based on some of the ideas in Peps’ book, we changed our approach towards year 7 maths homework for the summer term:

• All students in year 7 were to complete one short sparx homework (20-30 minutes) each week. This is a half -length sparx homework – more on this later!
• This had to be completed by Friday each week for all year 7 students no matter what class they were in.
• In school support was available to students to complete homework in school if they did not have a device at home.
• This homework was based on retrieval of topics that they had already covered in year 7 this year
• SUCCESS was key

I will explain the rationale behind our decisions base on ideas in “Motivated Teaching”. Our engagement in homework for year 7 started at 45% prior to the trial, it subsequently rose to an average of 75% in the summer term.

Motivation
Peps explains that motivation ‘is a system for allocating attention’. It is a response to the opportunities that we face, rather than a general character trait of the person that we are. Motivation for learning is something that we must actively build. We can do this by building the 5 core drivers of motivation for learning:

• Secure success
• Run routines
• Nudge norms
• Build belonging
• Boost buy-in

I am going to focus on the first 3 in this blog and how we tweaked our homework approach to build these drivers.

Secure Success
Our motivation is deeply influenced by our expectation of future success. We are more likely to invest our time in something if we can anticipate success. But securing success is not about making things easier for pupils. This podcast from Sandringham research school with Marc Rowland (https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/episode-1-pupil-premium-with-marc-rowland/id1516020856?i=1000476461565) talks about the importance of ensuring that students are achieving success within challenging lessons, and this is especially true for disadvantaged students. The more opportunities that we can give students to achieve success whilst being challenged in school, the greater the chances of them feeling stronger levels of self-esteem, confidence and motivation towards school. We need to provide learning experiences that are challenging but achievable for as many students as possible.

Luckily Sparx is a fantastic resource that delivers personalised maths practice that is cleverly pitched for students’ current level of understanding. We ensured that topics were based on previously taught content from the spring term (aiding retrieval) and we shortened the homework to 30 minutes. Remember, this was not to make things easier for students, this was to ensure that we increased the likelihood of success, and we started to build strong habits towards completion. Ideally, we would want this homework to be a full 1 hour, but we decided to focus on securing the engagement and success in order to build the habit first, then increase the length later.

Run Routines
Pupils interpretation of cost – the amount of effort and attention needed to complete a task, can heavily influence their levels of motivation. We need the make the process of learning easy, whilst keeping the content as challenging as possible (isn’t teaching hard!). One of the most effective ways that we can achieve this is by establishing routines in the classroom. In ‘Motivated Teaching’, Peps explains that routines discard unnecessary decision costs and decrease the amount of information that we have to process.

So how did we “run routines” with year 7? All Sparx homework was due in on a Friday each week. This was a significant change to what we had done previously where class teachers set their homework hand in day, and this would differ from class to class. Regardless of class, this day is resolute and importantly, nothing disrupts this routine. The set day made it easier for us to give reminders for every student (and parent) in the year group through using Microsoft Teams, our school Instagram, posters in classrooms, messages to year 7 form groups and even informal verbal reminders on the corridor during lesson changeover. Sparx homework started to become something that was just “done” by year 7 students by Friday every week.

Nudge Norms
My favourite of the 5 core drivers!! Peps explains that in our attempt to ‘figure out where best to allocate our attention, we have evolved to refer heavily to the behaviour and attitudes of others’. If those around us are doing it, it can’t be all that bad a bet. Norms play a massive role within schools and we can make desirable norms more visible by increasing their Profusion and Prominence.

To increase profusion we have to push for maximum uptake, 100% is the goal. To increase prominence we have to make those desirable norms more readily seen. Most importantly, we have to emphasise what we want to happen, rather than what we don’t. We feel safe to do something if those around us are doing it. If all of those around us are doing it, it becomes risky for us to not!

As a department we needed to change the narrative to: “In year 7, we complete our Maths homework each week”. This had to become the norm. So how did we tackle profusion and prominence:

• Initial contact with parents – all year 7 parents were contacted to inform them of expectations, the new homework day and the dates that subsequent homeworks were due in. Profusion.
• Parents were contacted each week if their child had not completed their homework. Profusion.
• Prior to the first week of homework being set, all year 7 students were given opportunity during a maths lesson to log onto Sparx in order to correct any issues with forgotten logins etc. Profusion.
• Lots of “air time” given to celebrating homework completion. Each week I visited year 7 form groups and publicly celebrated those students who had engaged with homework. Prominence.
• I privately targeted groups of students who had not engaged and helped to discuss and break down any barriers. Profusion.
• We celebrated (and sent reminders regarding) the homework completion via the schools Instagram page (we get high levels of parental engagement with this) for example, “Well done to the 75% of year 7 students who did sparx homework last week”. I hoped that this would encourage further conversations at home with parents checking if their child was ‘safely’ in the 75%. Profusion and Prominence.
• I asked form tutors and class teachers to both celebrate the successful homework each week, and remind students of when the next homework was due in. Profusion and Prominence.

Results
Prior to the start of the summer term our year 7 Sparx homework engagement was averaging between 40-50%. During the first week of the summer term we shot up to 72%, then subsequent weeks we hit 75%, 80%, 75%, 75%. We considerably improved our overall engagement across the 5 weeks.

A few points on this:

• Of the 75-80% of students engaging with homework, not all of the homework was fully completed. This is something that we will tackle this year, but we felt it was important to get all students completing some homework first. When this routine is established, we will then move towards full completion.
• What about the forgotten 20%-25%? Interestingly, this group of students changed week on week, so a very small number of students (4 students out of 185) completed no homework at all over the 6 week period. I’ll take that as a win!
• Of course, we want all students to be completing each week, but as mentioned previously, this takes significant time and effort. We “nudge the norm” for the majority, which then gives us a significantly smaller group of students who require additional intervention.

Next steps:

• We will continue with this approach into the autumn term to include all students from years 7, 8, 9 with Sparx homework due on Friday for all year groups
• We establish engagement first, then move towards full completion
• We will identify students/parents who need further support/encouragement (e.g. the 4 students from year 7 last year who completed none at all)
• We will have a new KS3 homework routine for the whole school, something that I know @MrThorntonTeach will share in due course.
• We have moved as a school towards the use of class charts for setting homework, this will help us significantly with parental engagement and whole school homework routines
• We will continue with Sparx Maths! A great resource for any school, if you haven’t checked it out yet, make sure you do

Finally, If you haven’t yet read “Motivated Teaching” I implore you to give it a read. It has been instrumental for me in not only developing our approach to homework, but in my day to day classroom teaching.

Retrieval practice is something that I have been working on for the past four years (Wow! How quick does time fly!) By now retrieval practice through low-stakes quizzing is heavily embedded into my teaching practice. I won’t go through any of the evidence behind it as I’m sure most of you will have heard and read it before.

I will attach two of my earlier (slightly outdated) blogs which will help to demonstrate my earlier work into retrieval practice:

(November 2016) https://mchsresearchblog.wordpress.com/2016/11/14/retrieval-practice/ 

 (June 2017) https://mchsresearchblog.wordpress.com/2017/06/22/can-hotel-room-numbers-become-mobile-phone-numbers/

But there are hundred of sources of information regarding recall and retrieval: Make it Stick, Rosenhine’s principles of instruction, The learning scientists @AceThatTest, Craig Barton’s “How I wish I’d taught Maths” to name a few places of where my inspiration has come from!

It has been two and a half years since I have last blogged. But recall practice is something that I am always thinking of taking further. I was looking for more efficient ways of carrying out my low stakes quizzing in maths, in particular, a way to better track as and when content was being recalled.

Around 18 months ago I came up with what I like to call my “Recall Planner”. The Planner is an Excel document containing two sections.

1. The Topic List
2. The Recall Map

The Topic List

At the end of each week I plan to list a maximum of five mathematical topics, concepts or “skills” that have been covered in class during that week. For the purpose of the rest of the blog I will refer to them as skills. These skills are normally what has been covered in lessons that week, however if there are any spaces in the map, I will sometimes fill them with other skills. These extra skills are usually areas of weakness for the class that have been identified from assessments, homework tasks or other activities in class that week.

The planner has enough space for 72 weeks of skills. My year 11 class are currently on week 49 and I started listing for them during their first week of year 10. Here is a screenshot of a section of their map:

Let’s take a closer look at a couple of the weeks…

Week 1

In Year 10 we started the first week on the topic of Pythagoras’ Theorem. I am careful to be quite specific in what I input into the topic list. In the week of pythagoras I have included “Converse Pythagoras” and “Pythagoras problems” – for example where students have to calculate a missing length or perpendicular height first, before calculating the perimeter/area of a triangle. It is important that I am specific as possible here and I will come back to this when I talk about the design of my low-stakes quizzes later on. The last skill in that week is “expand double brackets”. This won’t have been first taught in that week but was perhaps a skill that cropped up during the week on a homework/5 a day and I identified that it was a weakness for students and so needed to be popped into some low stakes quizzes at a later date.

Week 42

Here you will see that this week is highlighted yellow. This is due to the fact that there has been an assessment this week and new content hasn’t been introduced. So instead I have filled the topic list with 5 areas from the GCSE paper that students should have “nailed” but in fact haven’t. For example, “tiles on the floor problem” any Edexcel Maths teacher will know the type of question that I’m talking about here! Now I have identified, after perhaps some feedback/intervention with the students after the paper, that re-teaching doesn’t need to happen here for this type of question, but perhaps the students would benefit from seeing a similar question in some recall quizzes further in the weeks to follow!

The topic list is also a really informal record of what content has been covered with that class each week. Handy to look back on from time to time.

The Recall Map

The other section of the recall planner is a recall map (shown below). The aim of this map is to demonstrate which set of skills should appear in low stakes quizzes each week.

For example, in week 10, the skills that would appear on the low stakes quiz that week are skills that were originally introduced in lessons during teaching weeks 1, 5 and 8 (a maximum of 15 skills altogether). Each time a set of skills appears on a recall test, the time until it next appears is increased. This is due to the evidence promoting spaced practice. Each set of skills will appear in 3 weeks’ worth of low stakes quizzes. (This is again important for any skills that have been identified as weaknesses during assessment weeks, as those skills appear on three low stakes quizzes as well to give the students extra practice).

After each set of weekly skills has been recalled three times they are then grouped together in blocks. E.g. Block A contains skills from weeks 1-4. Now, it is impossible to keep recalling everything – you would never get through any new content! But I do try to come back to these groups after longer intervals where possible. For examples in week 16 of the recall map, I already need to complete a low stakes quiz containing skills from weeks 7, 11 and 14. But there is a little yellow box reminder on the map there that if I have any space in my quiz, or a new homework to set, or space on my 5 a day activity it could be worth including some skills from Block A.

Structure of the Recall Practice

In the past I have used several different structures for retrieval practice. I previously designed online quizzes using software such as Socrative, recall quizzes where questions were projected onto the board using PowerPoint, and teacher paced questions read aloud. Online quizzes have worked well for me in the past, however I decided to move away from online testing due to time constraints. The process of logging students on to laptops or iPads to complete the tests took up too much valuable curriculum time. I now use printed recall quizzes, this is for several reasons. Firstly, it ensures that the completion of the quizzes is student-paced, and there is no decreased engagement from students having to wait for others to finish before they can move onto the next question. Secondly, it allows me to ask a wider variety of questions as there are no restrictions on the type of question that can be included. Finally, each question is clearly visible to each student. This was not always the case when questions were projected onto the board. Each printed test is one A4 double-sided sheet consisting (normally) of a maximum of 16 questions. An example of one of the printed recall tests is shown below.

In recent times my quizzes for year 11 have become even longer as I desperately try to cram as many topics as possible onto the quiz for them to practice. (And achieve that all important Grade 5!)

Here is the latest quiz for my year 11 foundation class.

I make one quiz each week for each of my year 10 and 11 classes. Thanks, as always to Mr Corbett @Corbettmaths. I am continually snipping questions and diagrams from his website which saves me valuable time. I also often snip directly from exam papers or Edexcel Exam Wizard if I’m looking for a specific style of question. This used to take a lot of time but after 49 weeks I am getting much quicker! Plus you tend to remember where particular questions are situated on exam papers (yes I know that sounds sad!) Again I will mention the importance of being specific on the topic list, this ensures I include a variety of different questions and topics can be presented to students in a variety of ways.

Completion of the quizzes and importantly feedback of answers to students can take up to a maximum of one full lesson each week. This is a lot of curriculum time, but it is time well spent in my opinion. After all, what is the point in continuously presenting new material to students if they are never going to remember it.

I will tie it up there. Thank you to those people who have made it to the end. There is more for me to report on, I recently completed a trial as part of my Chartered College CTeach looking into whether I could use confidence scoring in low stakes quizzes in order to exploit the Hypercorrection Effect. But perhaps it’s best that I leave that for another blog another day!

Here is a link to a blank copy of the recall planner:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/i475lvymxglzayi/Recall%20Planner%20BLANK%20COPY.xlsx?dl=0

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton